State chatbot laws could create regulatory patchwork, new report warns

Ah, the United States has discovered a brand-new way to regulate artificial intelligence: fifty different answers to the same question, all of them wrong. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has issued a report in which policy analyst Alex Ambrose warns that state chatbot laws are building a 'regulatory patchwork' that could give compliance lawyers the job security normally reserved for nuclear war planners. Quite right, because nothing says 'we take chatbot risks seriously' like fifty separate legislative definitions of what a chatbot actually is. One imagines the ITIF board congratulating itself on a report so sensible it will be cited, nodded at, and ignored by every statehouse in the land.

Ambrose's central demand is almost painful in its reasonableness: focus on documented harms, and resist the urge to import social media policies wholesale. One wants to applaud, until one remembers that 'documented harms' in tech regulation have historically been documented about four years after the harm has finished happening, usually during a Senate hearing where the executive says he was 'not aware' of the memo. The alternative — importing social media policies — is precisely the lazy photocopying that state legislatures perform with the enthusiasm of a photocopier promised a warmer room. Still, credit where due: the man has identified the patchwork problem, which is more than most federal legislators have managed.

The likely solution is a federal bill that arrives in 2029, containing one enforceable provision requiring chatbots to politely decline to answer questions about the bill itself. States will continue their game of Whac-A-Mole: California regulating chatbot empathy, Texas regulating chatbot honesty, Florida regulating chatbot weather predictions. Companies will comply with the strictest rule everywhere, pass the cost to consumers, and call the exercise 'innovation-friendly'. Alex Ambrose is right that a patchwork is a problem; he is too polite to point out that the alternative is a federal government that cannot agree on the colour of the sky. One hopes the ITIF's next report tackles the real emergency: chatbots ending up more coherent than the legislatures regulating them.